How to Create a Digital Magazine: Steps, Cost, and Platforms

You have come to the right place if you are looking for an overview of how to create a digital magazine. Nowadays, digital magazines have developed so fast and are being used as a reliable marketing strategy by many forward-thinking startups and big companies out there.

Before creating a digital magazine, you have to develop the right strategy that will cost you a minimum amount of money yet could give you an interesting and stunning magazine.

We will give you a guideline about how to create a digital magazine, how much it costs, and the right tools for creating and publishing a digital magazine.

A Step to Step Guide on Creating A Digital Magazine

Let’s take a first baby step which is defining the perfect niche and the right audience for your digital magazine. Just like every business, the first step that you must do to create a digital magazine is to find the most suitable niche and the right audience for your digital magazine. There’s no good or bad niche as long as it aligns with your passion, hobby or business goals. It’s important to note that the more competitors you have in your niche, the harder your efforts will be to make your digital magazine stand-out.

Creating a Phenomenal Design for Your Digital Magazine

The magazine cover is the first thing that people would see. The cover of a digital magazine will determine whether someone will consider your digital magazine or not. On the other hand, the great layout would determine whether they will read your magazine or not.

For the cover, you must design it in a way that your magazine can be differentiated from other magazines and give a big impact to the audience. Moreover, you can also take your target audience’s preference into consideration. For instance, if your audience is an ambitious young entrepreneur, then you can present a successful entrepreneur figure as a model of the digital magazine’s cover. Once your cover is ready, you can move on to the other steps of creating your digital magazine.

Provide epic digital magazine content for your audience.

A powerful design with a great layout isn’t enough. Your digital magazine has to provide an epic content that captures your audience. In general, there are three types of content based on their purpose, that is entertaining, inspiring, and providing useful information.

You can choose one of them, but it’s better to combine some of them so you can provide insightful content to your audience. If you don’t have time to write your own content, then you can hire a professional writer with suitable qualifications.

Whether you will hire a writer or write the content on your own, you must ensure that your digital magazine’s content has a consistent writing style and format so it won’t confuse your audience.

There are three things that you must consider before choosing the right platform for creating and publishing your digital magazine. The cost is the first thing. The second thing is interactivity and flexibility in design. The last thing is the devices that will be used to read your digital magazine.

One of the best platforms that you can use for creating and publishing a digital magazine is MagLoft. MagLoft helps you publish your own fully branded native apps in major Apps Stores (Google Play Store, Apple App Stores, Amazon App Stores). MagLoft also offers an HTML5 web app which can be 100% branded to your publications and websites.

One of the unique features of MagLoft is their visual drag and drop editor which allows you to create interactive and responsive content that fits perfectly on any screen size and orientation. Additional features like analytics, push notifications, in-app pages, custom subscriptions, API integrations and much more allow you to extend the functionality of all your apps.

MagLoft also offers custom development and solutions for companies that are looking for very specific designs, functionality and use cases. We have worked with large enterprises like Yahoo Singapore, Prudential Hong Kong and Amway Inc. to come up with custom solutions.

Monetize a digital magazine

The last yet most important step about “how to create a digital magazine” is the monetization of your digital magazine. To be able to get money from your published digital magazine, you can sell your magazine issues on the major app stores such as App Store, Google Play Store, and Amazon App Store. In order to do so, you need to register as an Apple Developer by paying $99/year and $25 once for Google Play.

You can also offer paid subscriptions other than the paid issues. Not to mention a free trial for the subscription. Therefore, your readers can unlock your digital magazine issues freely for a particular time, then they have to pay when the free trial has been ended.

You can of course also monetize through your content itself. Lot’s of publishers offer affiliate products, sponsored content and other forms of JV’s and collaborations with companies and services.

So, how much does it cost to create a digital magazine?

Actually, there is no fixed cost in creating and publishing a digital magazine. You can even start for free. At MagLoft, you can create a free account and publish to your own online magazine. For publishing your branded mobile apps, pricing starts from $199 for our Professional plan. MagLoft will take care of all the technical parts so you can focus on what really matters, your content.

Other than platform fee, you need to think about hiring a professional writer for your content. As for your design, no need to worry since MagLoft has its state of the art editor named TypeLoft. If you have a tight budget then MagLoft will be a perfect solution for you.

And that’s a simple guide about how to create a digital magazine. It won’t be hard as long as you have the dedication, the right strategy and the best technical partner (MagLoft) to create and publish your own digital magazine. Good luck!